Monday, July 10, 2006

Economy and Governance

The World Bank has declared India as the 12th richest country in the world during the year 2005 based on its GDP numbers. According to the Times of India article India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has touched 785.47 Billion dollars in the year 2005 and India is the only south Asian country in the list. This is really good news indeed. We are harnessing the results for the golden economic reforms that we have made in the year 1991. Today India is one among the hot-spot destinations as far as Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) are concerned and I am able to witness the raise of educated Indian middle class in front of my eyes.

Having said that the economic growth alone cannot be called as ‘real’ growth because we are still fighting against fundamental problems like poverty, illiteracy, health-care and infrastructure in almost all parts of the country. The vibrant economy is helping me to buy a Honda City car but my poor governance is making me drive in the worst roads. So the need of the hour is good Governance which should make this economic growth to remove the poverty and improve the ‘Quality-of-life’ for everybody. We should learn from south-east Asian countries that got independence at the same time (Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan) and implement good governance.

Providing good governance in India is a real challenging task because of its ‘Diversified’ nature. Even though ‘Diversity’ is considered as strength in the Corporate as well as in the Investment world, in case of our country it is acting as a weakness because we are ‘Too-much-diversified’. We cannot talk to the whole country in a single language or bind the whole country under a single ideology. This makes the ‘Coalition’ government inevitable and makes the ruling party left with very less power to implement anything drastically. The recent ‘Hold-on-Disinvestment’ shows how difficult it is for any government to make any bold decisions.

Going by theories Economic reforms should change the needs of people and that need will drive the country towards good governance. For the past 1200 years India as a country is able to survive in spite of the foreign invasions is mainly because of its strong culture. Now it is time for us to take pride in our country and its strong culture and March towards improving ‘Quality-of-life’ and transforming ourselves into a ‘Developed’ nation.

2 comments:

Yes I agree.. To sustain n fuel the growth (read GDP in terms of metrics) further, India has to keep investing in the infrastructure and the education system. This growth should be across the sectors especially agriculture the most and not just IT alone.

This can only be achieved if we have a good n stable governance with a right leadership.

"Coalition" govt is the future of india we must accept that. It can really become a hurdle to the whole reform process especially if a rare species of human being called communist exist in it but I still feel things are going to happen sooner or later :-)..